The masculine paradigm cannot be detached from the ideology of fascism. With the strong notions of blood and the staunchness of virility embodied within the practice of fascism, it is not a surprise that the masculine man became the archetype of fascist success.
Before discussing how this image was characterised, perceived by society, and received by the fascist progenitors, it is important to outline the fundamental maxims of the fascist archetype. It is also worth stating early on that the case study for the thesis in progress is British fascism, meaning that most of the theory and evidence will be used in this context.
Fascism sought to actualise the idea of the new man. The Nietzschean proselytization that man had to become his inner self in order to avoid the enslavement of a rationale would prove to be poignant in fascist thought.[1] It was this man that would save the western world from a perceivable decay. It is in this regard that the fascist man was considered the absolute. He was the answer to the cyclical failures of materialism and history.[2] As the Italian fascist theorist Giovanni Gentile expressed, the fascist individual was the only solution to the failures of the historical matters of the 19th and early 20th century.[3] In Gentile’s eyes, the fascist man was the true incarnation of the Hegelian absolute.
Others stretched the concept of the absolute further than materialism and history. Not only would the fascist man be the answer to cyclic historical failures, but he would also be the solution to the abject deformations of humanity. His blood and race, his skin, and even the way he expressed his sexuality would follow a codification seen akin to purity. The National Socialists, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, and the Romanian Legion of Archangel Michael (The Iron Guard) are some of the European fascist organisations that expressed this search for purity.
For the British fascists, the image of what the ideal man constituted varied between the different organisations. Within the different fascist cohorts there were commonalities in some of the masculine ideals, but this does not mean there was unification in the masculine image they sought. The British Fascisti (BF), the Imperial Fascist League (IFL) and the British Union of Fascists (BUF) – arguably the three main organisations – had similarities in that their masculine archetype was rooted in the imperial superiority of Britain of a yesteryear. Within all three of the organisations there was a belief that the British man held a prerogative of superiority over the rest of the world.
However, the commonalities stop here. The IFL for instance – co-formed and led by Arnold Leese from 1928 to 1940 – moulded their masculine archetype more so on the lines of blood and genetic composition. The Nordic supremacy that Leese ingrained into his brand of fascism did mirror the embodiment of the Aryan myths used in National Socialism. In contrast, the British Fascisti – whom Leese separated from in 1924 – sought an ideal that centred around the protection of the British sphere of interest from the encroaching influence of bureaucratic praxis. In the words of their founder Rotha Lintorn-Orman, the British man and the BF would have ‘no past traditions to fetter its actions’.[4] They would be free to dictate their own realm. The BUF, the largest fascist party in Britain during the interwar period, sought the ideal of something even more grandiose than its counterparts. Oswald Mosley and BUF believed that the fascist was above the dictums of revolution, democracy, bolshevism, and the degeneracies of the 20th century. Historians such as Richard Thurlow and Kenneth Lunn have drawn parallels between Gentile and Mosley in that they both framed the fascist man as the absolute.[5] It is difficult to judge how intellectually versed Mosley was on the fundamentals of Hegelian idealism, but nonetheless this comparison helps one conceive what Mosely characterised as the fascist man. In Mosley eyes, he would be the answer to the contradictions of historical progress and would be suited to policing the world to assure its existence in peace and prosperity.
The image of the fascist man certainly acted as a superlative. More can be revealed about this exhibition when the antithesis is examined alongside the ideal. The archetype of the fascist man holds as great a significance as what he was not. It is not possible to uncover the totality of the fascist in this essay, but it worth outlining some of these traits against the antithesis.
One of the precedents in the ideal fascist archetype was his sexuality and how it was used. Sex and the function of it was separate from hedonism. Moreover, it was predominantly heteronormative. Even where there was the expression of pleasure, there was no degeneracy present. Androgynous forms and erotic perversions were not conducive to the superiority of the sexuality of fascism. One can see this in the German surrealist Otto Dix’s portrait of Sylvia Von Harden.[6] The depiction of her ambiguity was considered deplorable by the Nazis. When they came to power Dix was removed from his position at Dresden academy and most of his notable paintings were burnt after the 1937 Munich art exhibition of degenerate art.[7] Another exploration of this superlative in sexual form comes from the Italian director Tinto Brass in the film Salon Kitty. In one scene the SS commandant Wallenburg (Helmut Berger) guides the viewer down through a corridor of sexual degeneracy. In each room or chamber there is a form considered to be the antithesis of the fascist sexual superlative. This takes the shape of an amputee, a dwarf, a Jew, a homosexual act, and two expressions of masculine hyperbole.[8] After the inspection, the subjects – both men and women – are referred to as ‘rejects’, the men because of their sexual transgressions and the women for partaking in the act of sex with the antithesis.[9]
The fascist man’s physique was as equally measured. It was not ambivalent or flabby, nor was it disproportionate. The synthesis of balance was prioritized over the spectacular: a comparison between Arno Breker’s sculptor Der Wäger and the Apollo Belvedere is an example of this.[10] Like the Apollo, Breker’s depiction of the iron body was poised and symmetrical. It is not herculean and there is not the hint of the proclivity to aggression, something that would usually be associated with muscularity.[11] Rather, the balance of the male physique is more desirable because of the connotations of control and command.
In juxtaposition to this was the image of the grotesque. The depiction of the Jew proves to be one of the archetypes used in order to consolidate the masculine ideal. As with Gustav Dore’s The Wandering Jew and ‘the cuckoo’ found in the Hidden Hand, a magazine published by the Anti-Semtic Britons Publishing Society, there is nothing of the proportion found in the previous depictions.[12] The limbs, if the subject has any, are obtrusive, the nose has a phallic quality that is obscene, and the expression on both depictions is somewhat conniving. These images convey the importance of poise in the masculine ideal of fascism.
One final masculine archetype worth discussing is the importance of age. Youth is strongest connotation of virility, and the fascist ideal required insurmountable energy. There was no room for the aged or the stigmatized, and the ability of youth took precedence over any symptom of physical decay. The extent to which the youth was stressed as the symbolic vigour of a fascist nation is an illustration of its importance in the attachment to the image of masculine virility. In Nazi Germany the Hitler Youth carried the banner of the future of the party, in fascist Italy the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) channelled this symbolic importance through their youth section the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB).[13] Even where there were not official party affiliations or groups, the echo of the importance of youth in the image of fascist success is evident. Oswald Mosley proves to be one of these cases. He encouraged the younger members of the BUF to embrace the joys of hiking, exercise and the exploration of the land in which they had a definitive communal bond with.[14] The young man harboured the future of fascism, hence the significance they had towards its projection as an ideology of virility.
To understand the potency of the image of the fascist man, it is critical to outline what it was contextualised against. This will also reveal more about how the image of man was received, and why such an extremity of ideal failed. The absolute of man that could bring forth the fascist utopia can be framed as a precipitant of war. The results of the Great War – a chasm for both the victors and those defeated – carved apart nations and destroyed bodies. In the words of J.F.C. Fuller, a member of the BUF, it was the ‘materialist orgy of destruction, a perfect counterpart of the materialist orgy of construction that preceded it’.[15] In this disillusioning realty, the heroic ideal of chivalry in combat was well and truly buried. The man of interwar Europe existed in a world in which he survived yet carried the phenomenological experiences that still lingered upon the panoply of violence.
Considerable work has been done on understanding trauma and its impact on the habitus of behavioural capacities. However, in the historical paradigm, it is rarely attached to the subconscious phenomenon in how a subject interprets something like an ideology. This appears to be something worth discussing in greater detail as fascism can be argued as being causal to the trauma of an extremity like war. The utopia it seemingly offered was indicative of the intensity of pain and imminence the subconscious had with violence. The masculine universe harboured such phenomenological disturbances, and yet it was dislocated from the objective surroundings. Fascism appealed to such disturbances.
Alongside the context of war, fascism also offered solution to the shifts in modernity and thought. A man embroiled in the notions of war, and the protection of something as arbitrary as the confines of a race or nation, stood at odds with these expressions in absurdity. The artistic narratives of expressionism, vorticism, cubism, and many more looked increasingly like the individual pains of the subconscious. In response to this, the fascist ideal lurched into a cry for simplicity. As much as the collective meanings of blut und boden or mare nostrum were consolidations of man’s purpose within the fascist realm, they were also simplifying measures made against the absurd horrors of modernity.
It is worth stating that even within the trends of rejection, there were discrepancies in the artistic narrative of man. However, within these inconsistencies the essence of virility and violence is still conceptualised. Futurism and the intellectual contemporaries of Marinetti’s movement are examples of this. The human projection of action in hyperbolic velocity became one of the adopted flavours of the PNF. Within this narrative the capacities of man would be unified alongside the machine, and once again, this gave man a meaning. Despite the somewhat ambiguous narratives of the futurists – met with a degree of distaste from the National Socialists – there was a definitive arc of agency that man could reason with.
Reception and Projections of the Image of Man:
How these perceptions and contextualisation of the fascist man were received can be answered in two parts. Firstly, it is worth looking at who adopted the fascist discourse, and at which point they did so. Briefly analysing the different social backgrounds of those took up the fascist cause will clarify the difference between the masculine ideal and the individuals who sought to further this projection. It is evident from studying the British fascists that there is great diversity in those who saw prospect in the ideal.
The second angle deals with the projection of these ideals. How the virile extremity looked in relation to the image fostered in the imagination proves to be the more interesting discussion, as it leads to considerations into how the existential and phenomenological nuances interlope with the ideological matter at hand. At which exact point the ideology moves from the subconscious thought to conscious transgression is particularly hard to pinpoint, yet it is critical to understanding the masculine paradigm within fascism. It is this discussion which will prove to be the most challenging aspect of the thesis.
As mentioned above, the case study of research is the British fascists, and so it is entirely appropriate to focus in on these when discussing matters of reception and projection.
The list of societal groups and cohorts who joined the British fascist movement:
Occultists.
Veterinarians/Scientists.
War veterans.
Established politicians.
The Suffragettes.
Jews.
Former sportsmen.
Individuals from blue collar occupations.
Transgender people (Victor Barker).
Numerically, the British fascists were inconsequential in comparison to their European counterparts. As Roger Griffin has highlighted in his work, the sheer notion that BUF attained a membership of 50,000 strong was a bizarre and unexpected achievement.[16] By the likes of MI5, the British fascists were considered as a haphazard liability with a degree of malicious intent.[17] Figures are hard to corroborate due to the scarcity of source material, but historical estimations have shown that the IFL had around 150 members, the BF 600, and groups like the Britons functioned at one point in 1925 with as little as eight people. All in all, the British fascist conglomerate had eccentricity for its small size. This is one of the fundamental reasons why it is difficult to apply group or sociological frameworks when examining the behaviour of the British fascists. How the fascist ideal was projected is further consolidation of the individuality at play within the different cohorts.
There are similarities between some of the European tropes of the masculine ideal and manifestations made by the British fascists. Like the National Socialist, the British fascist had a strong lineage with his own soil and imminent community. Like the Italian Fascist, the British fascist had the guile for an action foreign to the lethargy of democracy. Like the Belgian Rexists and the Spanish Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), there was a presence of Christian manliness at the root of fascist authority – this is particularly prevalent in Mosley’s BUF. What transpired in image and thought for the British fascists was not detached from Eurocentric associations often made with the fascist ideology. However, this is not to say that the projection is one of mimesis. As mentioned above, the greatest existential differences remain with the British contextualisation of empire and monarchy.
What the pursuit of the masculine ideal in fascism meant for the British cohorts was, to a degree, attached to different matters. The reason behind the failure of the British fascists is still debated by historians, and many do point towards these perceptual roots of Britain’s imperial prerogative as the major factor in why it failed. As important as this is for understanding the timeline of British fascism, these types of debates undermine fascism as an existence within Britain during the interwar period. It is essential to grasp the fascist place within Britain, though it may have been numerically small. Modernity, sexuality, and proximity to violence with war were still rooted in the existence of man. Despite the failures of British fascism, the masculine ideal still sat at the heart of many of the British fascist’s visions.
Moreover, the failures are not separate from the transgressions that occur when the ideal traverses into conscious reality. Many of the British fascist organisations were derelict by 1939. A good degree of the progenitors had killed themselves through abuse or had turned far away from the movement. Many drifted into obscurity after their release from internment, never to be heard of again.[18] For those who continued to wrestle with the vision like Arnold Leese, the reality became evidently more disturbing – he simultaneously denied the holocaust and criticised Hitler only on the grounds that he did not finish the job at hand. The only individuals who seemed to have some malleability to changing times were Oswald Mosley and his wife, Lady Diana Mitford. Contrary to the projections of masculine superiority, the rest disintegrated.
The notion that the masculine ideal was conducive to a construct of power or hegemony is difficult to apply when considering the British fascists. Their failures were not due to just the British principles or tradition within empire and governance. Rather, the ideal and its intimate attachments to the subconscious is as definitive a reason into why the ideology failed. The realm of masculinity, whether pursued by some of the women running the organisations or the man who turned his hand to it once, is inextricably attached to the ideological fabric of fascism. However, this does not translate into assurance of power. If one is to concentrate on this one principle, they risk ignoring the death and misery of many of those involved with the course of the ideology during its interwar existence. To understand fascism on a deeper phenomenological level, there is a need to understand the reality of man and the interpretation of the existence he may have alongside the extremity of ideology.
Arron Cockell is currently pursuing his PHD at the University of Glasgow, focusing on masculinity, intellectual and societal history, having completed his MA in Modern History at the University of Leeds.
Notes: [1] To explore this notion further from Nietzsche: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil : Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (London, England ; New York, New York, USA : Penguin Books, [1990] ©1990, 1990). Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality. Vol. 9 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra : A Book for All and None (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006., 2006). For reference to Nietzsche’s thought within the context of fascism: Howard Williams, 'Nietzsche and Fascism', History of European Ideas, 11 (1989), 893-99. Ishay Landa, Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt against the Last Humans, 1848-1945 (Routledge, 2018). [2] For more on the Absolute and the phenomenology of spirit, see: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Miller Arnold V. Findlay J. N. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). [3] Giovanni Gentile, 'Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals', A Primer of Italian Fascism (1925), 297-303. Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: With Selections from Other Works (Routledge, 2017). [4] Rotha Lintorn Orman in the Fascist Bulletin. 26th Sept, 1925. [5] Kenneth Lunn, and Richard C Thurlow, British Fascism: Essays on the Radical Right in Inter-War Britain (Routledge, 2015), p. 13. [6] Otto Dix, ‘Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia Von Harden’, (1926). [7] For more on the Nazis reception on Surrealism and Modernism, see: Michael H Kater, Culture in Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2019). [8] Tinto Brass, Salon Kitty (1976). [9] Ibid. [10] Arno Breker, ‘Der Wäger’, (1936). [11] George Mosse points towards the influence of the image of classical antiquity in the construction of masculine myth. See: George L Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 32-39. [12] References to Gustav Dore’s The Wandering Jew (1852) and ‘The Cuckoo’ in The Hidden Hand I, (November 1920). Latter located in: Gisela C Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England 1918-1939 (De Gruyter, 2011). [13] Melanie Tebbutt, Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-War Years (Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 92. [14] Tony Collins, 'Return to Manhood: The Cult of Masculinity and the British Union of Fascists', The International journal of the history of sport, 16 (1999), p. 150. [15] J.F.C. Fuller in Thomas Linehan, British Fascism 1918-39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester University Press, 2021), p. 42. [16] Roger Griffin, ‘British Fascism: The Ugly Duckling', in The Failure of British Fascism (Springer, 1996), p. 151. [17] Stephen M. Cullen, 'Political Violence: The Case of the British Union of Fascists', journal of Contemporary History, 28. 2 (1993), 245-67. [18] Many of the British fascist members and progenitors were interned during the WW2. This was permissible under the legislation of the Defence Regulation 18B act which was passed in 1939. As many of the British fascists were hard to pin down, the majority were interned from 1940 onwards.
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